


It Shames The Mountains Tall

by blithers



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Colorado, F/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-26
Updated: 2012-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-31 18:52:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/347300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The love song of Vicki and Neil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Shames The Mountains Tall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [htbthomas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/htbthomas/gifts).



> Warning for a brief discussion of suicide, and spoilers through the end of season 2. Thank you to my beta reader, the foxy [51stcenturyfox](http://51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com)!

They're driving through Boulder on their way to the mountains and Vicki is absently dragging her fingers through the wind outside the open window, and he wonders again how the two of them went from Denny's to _this_. Because he doesn't remember asking her (or her asking him) but somehow an overnight bag had ended up in the trunk of his car and they're driving with the sun on their faces and he's the happiest he can remember feeling in a long, long time.

They lose the signal for the radio when they make the left hand turn to start driving up into the mountains, the highway winding slowly through columns of stone and spilling them straight into Rocky Mountain National Park. Vicki's been here for a weekend once with her parents, him on a field trip in elementary school, but they stare at the peaks of the mountains like they've never seen them before. The mountains cut the blue sky up into sharp angles and geometric shapes. The air is crisp as seltzer water this high up, clean and clear, and the sun burns the tip of his nose.

"I always forget the mountains are this big," he says. Normally he's the one who feels out of place in a crowd, but the towering view leaves him feeling pleasantly insignificant. "You can hardly see them from Greendale."

Her expression is distant, shadowed by the canary yellow hat she's somehow produced from the trunk. "That's one of the reasons I liked Greendale," she says finally.

They book a cheap hotel room in Estes Park, and he spends that first night unable to sleep, horribly aware of the fact that he is sleeping in a room with a girl lying not more than five feet away from him.

He tries not to listen to her breathing.

~~~

"What about this one?" She holds up a thin paperback of a handsome cowboy with a half-hidden face and the ominously ambiguous title _He Rode In At Midnight_ , and then starts to laugh at his expression.

"So that's a no on the romances, apparently. Got it."

He spins the wire rack, sparsely populated with books that have the sad, yellowing aura of the permanently abandoned, hoping to discover something that wasn't there a moment before. "There's nothing good here. This isn't going to work."

"We have no music! We need something to keep us going. What about..." she frowns at the bottom rack of the magazines, crowded with word searches and manically colorful children's books, "...Harry Potter? I know we'd agreed we'd find something new, but sometimes a classic's a classic."

She waves the paperback enticingly under his nose. He finally agrees out of pure desperation, but somewhere between the Hogwarts Express and the Sorting Hat he realizes that nothing new would have worked this perfectly. They do voices and work up to rather shameful attempts at the accents and he learns that when Vicki laughs, she doubles over so her hair falls down to hide her face and her nose wrinkles up.

He wonders sometimes, with a vague sense of uneasiness and hope, what she's learning about him.

~~~

"I wish we had sunsets like this." Vicki holds her thumb sideways at arm's length as she squints at the paper-thin strata of the sun setting in front of them. "The sun going behind the mountains is pretty, but it isn't a _sunset_. You know, like a real sunset, like they have in Iowa or whatever. Where it's flat."

They're parked at a scenic overlook on the western side of the Rockies, and the sun is melting the horizon into a puddle of creamed red and gold as they watch. His car is incongruously tiny against the massive backdrop of the plains dropping away before them, but the shabbiness doesn't seem so important with the sun setting golden with streaks of crimson and black in front of them.

"Yeah," he says, his eyes on the horizon as the sky starts to fade into a dusky purple at the edges. "I know what you mean."

~~~

They finish chapters together over dinner most nights, reading out loud and passing the book back and forth at the page breaks, trying to keep food from smudging at the edges. When they need a break from Harry Potter, he sketches short single-player dungeons and rolls dice on the dashboard, Vicki frowning at the road in front of them as she contemplates her options. In the evening they watch old sitcoms in their hotel room (she introduces him to Cheers and he makes her watch M*A*S*H).

They always book a double, but they sit next to each other when watching TV and sometimes he wonders if he should tell her that it's the first time he's ever been on the same bed as a girl. He doesn't, because he knows he'll be so embarrassed by the comment he'll try to laugh it off like a bad joke, but he watches her hand sometimes and wonders just how casual and brave he'd have to be to hold it.

~~~

"I'm tired of being treated like a joke," she says, and clutches the beer bottle in front of her a little tighter, frowning as she worries at the edge of the label glued to the thick brown glass with her thumb. The jukebox in the corner of the bar is amusing itself with an endless loop of Patsy Cline songs, and the man at the far end of the counter is asleep with his forehead pressed against the scarred wooden bar top and snoring gently at four o'clock in the afternoon.

She takes another sip of her beer and waves it around. "I'm just, like, I'm tired of feeling like I'm the punch line to somebody's idea of wacky community college students. The fat dancer, the girl who stabbed Pierce Hawthorne with a pencil, the overweight ballerina. I hate it. I'm going to move to New York when I'm done with Greendale, and dance on the stage." She smiles shyly at him, and the toe of her shoe touches his calf under the table. "You'll be an author, and people will call you by your real name because that's what's printed in the dust jacket."

She's rolling the bits of torn label between her fingers now, shaping pellets out of worn paper. "You stabbed Pierce with a pencil?"

"In the face."

"You're my hero," he says, and then, " _heroine_ ," and maybe his voice is a little too serious when he says it, because she's silent a moment before she grabs his hands and pulls him over to the jukebox, laughing that she's going to teach him how to line dance. She slaps her feet and scuffs her heel against the floor and he tries his best to follow her.

She dances like a top spinning, full of motion and grace. He feels ungainly next to her, but it's a different type of clumsiness than the one he's lived with all his life, so he's pretty sure he's okay with that.

~~~

They cross I-70 going south and take the back roads to Telluride, winding through National Forests that spill off of the mountains like the crushed green velvet skirts of a Christmas tree. Telluride is pretty and scrupulously clean. They realize quickly that they won't be able to afford a room at resort rates so they end up writing off the whole town as a signpost, driving onward and looking for a road heading west.

~~~

"I was going to kill myself," he says abruptly, "earlier this year, I mean. I felt like I wanted to. Kill myself, that is." They are twenty miles outside of Nowhere, Colorado and the radio's been hissing static for hours and somehow it seems like the right thing to say. The land is battered and pock-marked around them, strewn with rattlesnakes and sad little tufts of grass that rustle when the wind blows. The blue sky stretches out impossibly far in front of them.

Vicki is silent, but she takes a hand off the steering wheel to reach out and clasp his fingers.

He stares out of the window as the flat land rolls by like a film reel, the mountains unchanging and hazy in the distance. "I don't know why I didn't. Maybe I was never going to go through with the thing anyway. I don't know that I'm really brave enough, you know. But even thinking about it... it seemed to help, I guess. It gave me something I had control over, and gave things this weird sort of black and white perspective. Like, good versus evil, life versus death, stuff like that."

He stares down at her hand holding his own then, and suddenly he can _hear_ himself, the things that he's saying, and she's _holding his hand_ , and he's pretty sure he's blushing now, flushing a deep red that creeps up his neck. He turns to stare out the window again, feeling suddenly, unbearably awkward.

~~~

When they reach the New Mexico border the sky has turned the color of the inside of a jewelry box and she is still holding his hand.

He doesn't feel awkward anymore.

He has trouble falling asleep that night, caught staring at the ceiling with a secret pounding heavily in his chest, so loudly he's sure she'll be able to tell what he's thinking without him saying a word. But she falls asleep like normal, curled up in a ball with soft flannel pajama pants and an old drum squad t-shirt, and he lies in the dark with his heart beating out a rhythm of _I love you I love you I love you_.

~~~

The McDonalds is a monument to the 1970s, resplendent with paint peeling in pastel curls in the men's bathroom and a plastic life-size Ronald perched on a bench at the front, cheeks faded and his expression rubbed white with age. But the fries are hot and the golden arches are bright against a cloudless sky and it's the first sign of civilization they've seen in hours, so they pull in and demolish a set of combo meals.

Vicki holds up a fry, examining it critically. "People don't salt their fries enough nowadays. It's like they're afraid of offending people or something."

He sucks the salt and grease off his fingers. "Give me salt and I would die a happy man."

"Give me chocolate and I'd die a happy woman." They tap their fries together in a spirit of mutual camaraderie, which lasts until Vicki runs out of ketchup reserves and runs through hard bargaining, wheedling, stern resource actions, and outright war in short order. It ends when he surprises both of them and leans across the formica booth to kiss her as she's laughing.

She tastes sweet, like ketchup and salt, and her thick hair is alive with static and catches on his mouth, and he thinks, _I have Vicki's hair stuck to my lips_ , and it is at that moment he realizes that joy feels like a thousand tiny bubbles caught up inside of him, clinging to the sides of his soul.

They get chocolate milkshakes, to go.

~~~

Denver is a smudge in the distance, lighting up in the early evening with gleaming little points of coppery orange and industrial yellow, the downtown high rises melting together into a black bump on the horizon. The suburbs sprawl out around the city, and he wonders where exactly Greendale is in the network of lights and roads beneath them, hidden in the formless borders.

Vicki holds his hand, squeezing it gently. He feels as if they are framed in a shot of a movie, two dark outlines against the fading sky, watching the city below like superheroes.

"I don't want to go back," she says. "Why are we going back? I'm happy here with you."

He thinks about his answer carefully. "Maybe Greendale is where we need to be right now. Both of us. Together."

"You sound like one of those stupid commercials."

He laughs a little, and she grins at him reluctantly. He turns to face her, pulling her hand into both of his own, and running his thumb over the fine bones fanned across the back of her hand. He kisses the back of her hand then, gallantly, and her smile turns real.

"Neil," she says, and lifts her other hand to smooth the hair back from his eyes.

"I go where you go," he says softly, not knowing what else to say, and kisses her as Denver lights up slowly beneath them.

~~~

They drive.


End file.
